Jonathan Kay: The great news about those anti-Semitic flyers in Ukraine

When nationalist goons order Jews to register with the government, horrible things tend to follow. The history of Europe is tragically clear on this point. And yet, in Ukraine, history was flipped on its head this month: A failed effort to bait the country’s Jews shows that, even in Europe’s “bloodlands” (as Timothy Snyder has famously labelled this part of the world), overt anti-Semitism is now seen as a badge of disgrace.

On April 16, three masked men approached Passover worshippers gathered outside a synagogue in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk. They attempted to hand out flyers demanding that Jewish citizens register with the “Donetsk Republic commissar for nationality affairs” and pay a fee, on pain of expulsion from the breakaway pro-Russian “Donetsk People’s Republic.” The flyer’s authors justified the demand with the claim that “the leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine support the [ruling] junta in Kiev and are hostile to the Orthodox Donetsk Republic and its citizens.”

Western media took the flyers at face value. (U.S. secretary of state John Kerry called them “grotesque” and “beyond unacceptable.”) And it’s easy to see why: That last bit about Ukrainian Jews being “hostile to the Orthodox Donetsk Republic and its citizens” is a pitch-perfect take on the universal theme of traditional European anti-Semitism — that Jews are rootless, untrustworthy aliens who must be publicly shamed, or worse.

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These themes were at the heart of the most infamous and influential anti-Semitic tract of them all — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As with many anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns, the real target wasn’t only the Jews: The Protocols were cobbled together by Czarist hardliners seeking to tar political reformers as pawns of a diabolical Jewish conspiracy to control the world. In the Europe of the late 19th and early 20th century, using false documents to smear your enemy as a Jew-lover was viewed as effective hardball politics.

Fast-forward to 2014, and we can observe an interesting reversal: At a press conference last week, the governor of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” denied that he or anyone around him had anything to do with the flyers — and subsequent analysis suggested that the handouts were a crude hoax. Since no one knows the identity of the masked men who tried to distribute the flyers, it is impossible to know their motivations. But the leading theory, which I find credible, is that the flyers were part of a campaign, by supporters of the regime in Kyiv, to discredit the Donetsk pro-Russian separatists as fascists and anti-Semites.

I don’t want to make too much of three masked idiots passing around crudely photocopied faux-hate literature in an obscure corner of Ukraine. But this is part of a trend: For all the warnings we hear about anti-Semitism being “on the rise,” this noxious creed never has been more disreputable in the West. Yes, there are still some geriatric neo-Nazis who act out on their sick hatreds, such as former Ku Klux Klan leader Frazier Glenn Miller. And the extreme fringes of the anti-Israel movement do sometimes cross over into bald-faced Jew-hatred. But overall, anti-Semitism is now primarily a disease that infects Muslim nations, and the Muslim communities that exist in Western nations. And even on this front, it must be said, there has been some progress on this side of the Atlantic: Mainstream Muslim groups in North America now are scrupulous about avoiding any public pronouncements that might be interpreted as attacks on Jews, something that wasn’t true before 9/11.

Like Germany, Poland and Russia, Ukraine has a long history of violent anti-Semitism. Jew hatred is not extinct in that country, and likely never will be. But it counts as progress that political opportunists in that country now view being an anti-Semite as more disgraceful than being an anti-Semite’s quarry.

National Post

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— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.